I Feel... ANGRY!

A most unusual event occurred today. I believe that I actually experienced an emotion. This rarely happens and I am very excited about it. Ha! Excited! That's another emotion! And Ha! also! Well, Ha! isn't exactly an emotion... I guess I could call it delight, but that seems a tad strong. I think I'll just call Ha! the thrill of realisation. It's like I'm a veritable living cornucopia of emotional experience today. And they said I was dead inside. (They being my parents, my sister, the Catholic Church, my psychiatrist, two Papal Bulls, and the guy who wanted to remove my necrotic lymph node.)

So what initiated this outpouring of emotion? Well, somebody tried to kill me. And not in the usual, quite understandable way. When I say tried to kill me, I think that unusually for me they actually might have tried to kill me by accident. (Does paranoia count as an emotion?)

Anyway, I was driving along, heading around a curve, when the person in the car next to me decided that they would rather be where I was and almost drove into my side. Now if I was in the Hummer this wouldn't have been a problem. In fact I probably wouldn't have noticed them. Even after they had collided with me I probably wouldn't have noticed them. Of course, if I was in the Hummer there wouldn't have been a problem as I would have taken up both my lane and theirs and I would have been impossible not to notice. Even blind people can notice my Hummer. (The blind can sense evil.) But I wasn't in my Hummer, I was on a tiny motorised skateboard called a Hyundai Getz that only has enough power to do everything you could possibly want to legally do.

When I saw them attempting to turn into me, (an understandable desire, but foolish, as I don't think anyone else has got what it takes to be me), I swerved out of the way and honked the horn. And here's the interesting part. I honked the horn a second time even though it served no practical purpose as the goal of giving a warning would have been fully achieved by the first honkeration. I believe that I honked the horn a second time because I was feeling angry.

I'm very excited about this. I've never felt angry before. The best I've been able to manage is irritated or annoyed. But angry is something new. Sure I've pretended to be angry before, but I've never actually felt it. I've pretended to be angry when facing angry people, mainly to stop myself from laughing out loud because angry people look so hilarious. They go bright red, or at least the pale ones do, and they make the oddest expressions. But if instead of getting angry they go into a killing rage, then they go slack faced and ashen. It's actually quite surprising the number of people who go into a killing rage when I'm around. It's almost as if people don't like having the beliefs they've based their lives upon mocked as I try to help them by pedantically pointing out incongruities in said beliefs. Odd that.

Anyway, I'm hoping that feeling anger will help me understand other people and their bizarre, non-nonsensical, stupid, irrational, and frequently mindless behaviour better. You see, I'm trying to develop empathy. And I'm getting quite good at it too. I'm able to recognise four different facial expressions now. Admittedly I'm having trouble recognising these expressions in humans rather than muppets, but I think I've got the basics pretty much down pat.